


a kaleidoscope that shows the past

by salt-n-sin (milkfr0g)



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Depression, Destructive Behavior, Dissociation, Other, Repressed Memories, Suicidal Thoughts, quantum jumping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 15:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6525094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milkfr0g/pseuds/salt-n-sin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kardi hated her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a kaleidoscope that shows the past

**Author's Note:**

> The original blurb that inspired [ Kaleidoscope ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6470644)  
> 08/15/17 - Edited out some words...

Kardi lay awake in bed at one in the morning as she often did. At least this bed was closer to being her own than the last one she'd slept in. She knew that she would be jumping timelines soon, but no matter how prepared she'd been for it there was still a lingering sense of loss in her soul. Things had finally been looking up in the last timeline, at least that's what she thought. Kardi had a talent for overlooking important things like, "Where am I going to live?"

Felix had the same talent. She wondered which side of the family it came from, their mom or their dad. Too bad she never got to know them very well before her older brother had faked her death and moved her far, far away. All of her memories from before then, well, there was probably a reason they were repressed. She never bothered to try and remember what happened because she knew it must have been a hell of a lot worse than the rest of her childhood, and that was pretty terrible to begin with.

That aforementioned childhood probably being the cause of the problems Kardi had now. Well, other than constantly quantum jumping through alternate dimensions and timelines of course, though that certainly didn't help either. At least it was a popular genre in the media and she always had fictional characters to relate to even in timelines where her friends wouldn't talk to her.

Connecting through media had it's own drawbacks, however; Kardi could only feel emotion through fiction. She loved her friends, of course, but there was still some sort of emotional disconnect that she could never piece together. Maintaining a steady friendship just wasn't possible for her. She would go dark for days, even weeks at a time online or in reality.

Several timelines ago Kardi had been living on her own. One evening she woke up on her couch, the TV running a marathon of a popular cop drama. When she finally managed to drag herself to her computer desk and sign into voice chat her friends told her she'd been gone for five whole days. Dissociating, she guessed. That explained why her hair was so greasy, at least. Despite those episodes, however, that had certainly been her favorite timeline. It had been at least a year since she set foot there. The probability of getting back there was just about zero.

She had never had a decent boyfriend, though she pined over an old classmate for nearly a decade. That was fun. Watching them live their life through a computer screen, and no matter what timeline she happened to be in they never returned her feelings. She was grateful when the feelings suddenly stopped one day. _How?_ Kardi wondered. She had literally just woken up one morning and the yearning and lust was just.. _gone._ And she was so happy. It was thrilling and wonderful to be able to see them in person again, to be around them and party and just hang out without wanting to die.

Now the timelines had shifted again, and Kardi was in another city laying awake in another new (yet familiar) bed reading smutty self-insert fanfiction on her phone. The phone with a crack the screen and new chat messages from a roleplay app popping up every so often with guys hitting on her pretending to be popular fictional characters. She huffed at the latest message. The guy wasn't even a character she was interested in. He just chose the most popular guy in the franchise, not the one she was actually into. He knew that too, so why was he even trying to push it? Then he told her to play an entirely different video game.

_How about I just kill myself?_ Kardi thought, and to be quite honest death actually sounded appealing. As much as her new parents tried to do their best to help her depression and whatever else was wrong with her, during the winter and on days when it rained it just wasn't enough. With the quantum jumping she'd never be able to keep her sanity if she had real life problems to worry about like a job or taxes, but nobody knew about the jumps so people naturally demanded she get up and get a job anyway. Death was appealing, but then she wouldn't get to indulge herself in fiction anymore. The truth of the matter was that Kardi simply wanted to be left alone and receive a fat check in the mail every so often. In every timeline, if it could be arranged.

Fate worked in mysterious ways, though. Kardi knew that timelines could dead-end or split, but how she ended up with Nel and Vivienne she couldn't quite figure out. The two other girls didn't even seem to be of the same world as herself. Though she didn't have much time to be preoccupied with trying to figure those two out when her other three new roommates were something straight out of the fiction she resonated with so much. Two of them were skeletons, the third being.. kind of.. partially a skeleton? It didn't really matter to Kardi, because she called him her lover _._

**Author's Note:**

> I have nothing to say for myself. /:


End file.
